NewsCelera Association

Celera Association

In 2014, Javier García Martínez, a renowned international scientist, together with the Rafael del Pino Foundation, founded a new initiative that is unique in terms of its objectives and capacity for social transformation.

Photo: Celera Association. Credit: Pexels

Celera is a program which identifies 10 exceptionally talented young people in Spain each year to provide them with the necessary tools to enable them to enhance their personal and professional skills so that they can maximize their potential. 

These young people, known as ‘Celerados’, also receive training on their socio-emotional competences, as well as enjoying a range of national and international opportunities. The aim is to channel their concerns by providing an environment that creates synergies and a space for support, as well as access to opportunities and people of importance. 

As a continuation of Opinno.org’s pro bono work and in recognition of its efforts in recent years, we are collaborating with Celera on a project consisting of 8 innovation workshops to be held during 2021 as part of its Hard Skills program. 

“Celera has a multitude of initiatives aimed at its employees. From the beginning we realized that the value of our contribution lay in organizing workshops with a very practical approach and focused on innovation,” says Mariana Margarita, Opinno’s Project Manager and Facilitator in the training of these workshops. “We started with a purely digital format that has evolved into a more hybrid format with face-to-face and online attendance.” 

As they are very proactive, all the sessions are very participative. Celera invites all the selected young people from the beginning of their activity, so that in addition to the training component, the workshops also serve to bring together different generations of ‘Celerados’. 

The 8 workshops that make up this collaboration have an approximate duration of 1.5 to 2 hours and they deal with different themes. 

The first workshop was held in February and focused on Lean Startup methodology for developing businesses and products, such as entrepreneurship, which is precisely one of the participant’s main concerns. 

From April to June there were 2 innovation workshops focused on Agile Methodologies and Continuous Improvement, and one on leadership and the Servant Leadership method.
 
Starting in September, the workshops will focus on Communication, Financing and Financial Innovation, Productivity and the Smart Working formula, and finally Legal and Innovating for Compliance. 

After each workshop, Opinno follows up by sending links or related articles to all participants. Our goal is to be able to replicate the experience and make it scalable, so for us it has been a real learning experience and the satisfaction of continuing to collaborate in the acceleration of talent in Spain. 

In this respect, we are left with the words of Diego Faxas, Celera’s Acceleration Program Coordinator: “This is just the beginning of a relationship that will have many other synergies and support for impact projects with the aim of providing the best of the best to those being accelerated.”